Of tears soaked in painful laughter

LIFE, I’m aware, never gave us the assurance of a harvest of unlimited laughter neither did it promise us unfathomable thorns of sorrow. However, as the Nigerian situation sinks frustratingly deeper into a state of anomie, the Hobbesian prognosis of man’s life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” gets too close for comfort.

In all honesty, I had vowed, some few days ago, to stop haunting myself with the songs of lamentation that pervade our land and focus on the small things that seem to drive away our collective pain. Tried as I could, my laughter bleeds blood and aches with deep pain. I have often wondered why, in recent times, every smile that I manage to etch on this seemingly eternally forlorn face is interjected with the eerie silence of anguish. Somehow, and without realising it, violence now defines our jokes as fear rules the land and we laugh through the drop-dead anguish. Before now, we thought we could reclaim the humanity we lost on the altar of cheap politicking. Today, no one is sure if we ever had any. Or did we?

Like I have often ranted, we need not bother asking where and how we got to this bloody plain. It’s simply pointless especially with the infantile politics strewn around this calamitous rendezvous. You can hardly make sense out of this nonsensical maze. You are condemned to waking up the next day to be confronted with another sad tale of lives snuffed out in one village, town or even city.

You ask if a nation could ever survive this endless bloodletting and you are told the authorities are clipping the wings of the perpetrators. You dare them to name and shame the blood sucking vampires but a tribe of babbling voices shouts you down, offering reasons why it is not politically expedient. Yet, daily, we count the body bags in tens, scores and hundreds. Now, how do you reconcile this with the thunderous silence in high places sans the monotonous echoes of presidential platitudes? Why is there so much hatred in the land? No one is sure of any answer. Everyone trudges on until the next tragedy happens and, as usual, we shrug it off with our ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs!’ This life! If the dead could move, I’m sure my friend, Suleiman Bissala, would have turned in the grave when President Goodluck Jonathan repeated the same line at the scene of the June 25 bombing in EMAB Plaza, Wuse 2, Abuja. For sure, no one is asking our President and his men to perform

magic. No. But what’s the point in offering a relief that everyone knows is a no-brainer. As terror grows in monstrous velocity through the years from Plateau State to virtually every parts of the North with shades of its showing up in other geo-political zones, it’s been a repeated streak of hopeless assurances laden with ignoble lethargy. It’s easy to whine that it was unfortunate that Bissala, a Managing Editor (North) with The New Telegraph, happened to be at the right place at the wrong time and that he was one of the victims that fell into the deadly trap set by the evil ones pumping fear into our hearts.

But how would that guarantee a better future for his wife and five young children? How do they start foraging for faith in a society that has lost its humanity as the ogre of mutual distrust grows by the day? How does one rationalise the tragic loss of professional colleague few moments after observing the Asr prayer as a devout Muslim? Do we even understand the collateral damage this harvest of needless deaths is inflicting on families, on our psyche and on the society at large?

The crying truth is: terror has seized this country by its tender balls. It is killing us softly. Aside the abductions and killings in Borno, Kaduna, Benue, Plateau and Taraba states with hundreds of casualties, the spate of bombings or blast in just ten days, as captured by a report in the July 2, 2014 edition of the Daily Trust, should be of major concern to all of us, especially those who pretend to be on top of the situation.

According to the report, eight souls were lost in the car bombing in a school in Kano on June 23; the EMAB Plaza bombing wasted 24 lives on June 25; the hotel bombing in Bauchi claimed 13 lives on June 27; a whopping 56 bodies were recorded at the market bombing in Maiduguri on July 1; two persons died in the Kaduna blast on July 1; and many were injured in the ‘carbide’ blast in Osun State on July 1. The paper forgot to list the number of people that died in the controversial car/oil tank explosion in Lagos. All this in just 10 days in the life of a nation that pretends to be on a roller-coaster! With all this, you’d have thought fear would have cowed the average Nigerian into a state of paralysis where laughter is a sacrilege, an impossible reality. Not really. If anything, Nigerians, once described as one of the happiest people in the world, have reawakened their sense of humour in an astonishingly brazen manner. And so, in defiance to those peddling hate messages, killing and maiming with reckless abandon while taunting the authorities to get them if they could, Nigerians have evolved an ingenious way of soaking their pains in the ocean of painful laughter. You just need to read through some of the jokes being shared on the social media and other platforms to appreciate the creative instincts that Nigerians employ to poke fun at their pain and lighten the gloom. Below are a couple of the interesting ones that this writer has come across in the last few days which has rekindled some form of hope in this fallen house! There was this one which makes light joke of the Super Eagles’ ouster at World Cup. It reads: “After their return from Brazil World Cup, Super Eagles players were so ashamed of their failure that they decided to disguise so as not to be recognised. Mikel disguised as a Reverend Father. While walking on the streets of Lagos, suddenly, an old lady walked up to him and said: ‘Hi, Mikel!’ Amazed and annoyed that an old lady had seen through his disguise, he went back and dressed like a Mallam.

Again he bumped into the same old lady and she said: ‘Where are you going to, Mikel?’ Confused and puzzled, Mikel asked: ‘But how did you recognise me Mama?’ The old lady laughed out loud and replied: ‘Are you stupid or what? Oloshi, it’s me, Calamity Yobo!’

Another post, a rehash of a recent true life incident somewhere in Nigeria, really got my eyeballs rolling in tears. It asks: “Do you come with the FIFA World Cup Trophy? Oh, you were not informed…ehn? Kontunu…no problem. God will see us. There is God, there is God in everything we are doing. Those goals that are sharing in Brazil will answer. What of two goals, two goals? Ehn, what of two goals that can tell us that you guys prepared for the match…? Do you come with any? Keshi…no? Na only you waka come? Will you keep quiet? Chai! Chai!! Chai!!! And then this one that has gone viral on many platforms: “Nigeria don nearly doroscatter . Everywhere is dorobombing. Over 200 girls are doromissing and yet we are singing dorobucci. Hmnn, let us doropray before things doroworsen. So, my doropeople , do have a nice doronight and be dorovigilant if you don’t want to dorodie. This is not dorofunny ooo. Please doroshare if you dorolike it!

You may laugh it off as one of those jokes but they are more than that. Deeply embedded in these funny lines are the pains of a nation in tethers—a country in search of redemption. These little nuggets somehow help in keeping hope alive. We laugh because we are tired of crying to the deaf ears of those who simply do nothing other offering excuses for incompetence. We are not unmindful of the fact that this dangerous bell of violence, killings and bombings do toll for all us. Oftentimes, we do ask: who’s next in this senseless carnage? No one knows as the enemy lurks in the shadows, baying for blood. However, since life is for the living, we’ve resolved to soak our tears in the ocean of painful laughter, fully aware that tomorrow’s promises are shrouded in the mystery of the unknown. That’s the reality that confronts us daily as we, the living dead, bury the dead. What’s next in this stream of tragic impulses? If you ask me, who do I ask?